Sociopathic Behavior is at the Heart of All Threats to Democracy

This is part 4 of Gini's Gun Violence series. We strongly recommend reading each part in numerical order because each part contains logic based on the preceding parts.

• Part 1: Do Guns Enable Us to Defend Our Physical Bodies?
• Part 2: Can We Prevent Evil Human Animals from Killing Innocent Humans?
• Part 3: Do Guns Enable Us to Defend Our Democratic Freedom from Tyrannical Governments?
• Part 4: Sociopathic Behavior is at the Heart of All Threats to Democracy.

Sociopathic Behavior is at the Heart of All Threats to Democracy

International Peace Requires a Strong Military. We are not pacifists at Gini. We know that corrupt and sociopathic politicians frequently ascend to positions of power in many countries. In this context, weapons stockpiled for defensive purposes generally create peace at the international level because a strong military is a strong deterrent against aggression from foreign regimes. (Of course, senior U.S. officials have taken this principle to an absurd and immoral extreme.)

A Balance of Power is Essential for Peace at All Levels of Human Existence. Many government officials in the U.S. and several other countries today behave according to the sociopathic principles of realpolitik, which fundamentally ignores all substantive humanitarian values. This is why they conjure up so many rationalizations about why they should conquer or sabotage other countries. Then they repeat their rationalizations so often that they start believing they have no other choice but to act on their delusions.

Power Imbalances Spawn the Sociopathic Behavior that Leads to War. Humanitarian atrocities like the Iraq War, the Vietnam War, the Nazi Holocaust, and many others are  fundamentally spawned by the same sociopathic mindset that leads to the weaponization of wealth and psychological distancing. That's why extreme wealth concentration and geopolitical power imbalances both destroy democracy, i.e., they're both manifestations of systemic imbalances of power that destroy the equilibrium and integrity of critical governance processes and institutions that are necessary for peace and long-run, broad-based economic prosperity.

The Scourge of Realpolitik. Realpolitik is why Ambassador Kurt Volker is now embroiled in the biggest political scandal in our country today. Among other conversations I've had with him, I've talked to Kurt about this specific issue: humanitarian values vs. realpolitik. Kurt is a nice guy, but given that he is a political creature, it's not hard to guess what side of that "values vs. realpolitik" debate he was on. Up until that conversation, I thought he was relatively different from most other federal politicians that I've met, but he's fundamentally no different for the reasons I described in our Broken Capitalism book. In particular, all federal-level politicians in the U.S. today have essentially the same systemically corrupt institutional incentives. Thus, no matter how much you might like a given politician, the broken realpolitik incentives embedded within the U.S. economic and political systems today produce corrupt outcomes more frequently than ever before.

From the gun rights newsletter introduced in part 3:

This is history, not the BS that's being espoused by the media, sanctioned by many of our illustrious delusional leaders in Washington.

I agree with the "delusional leaders" comment, but the author's newsletter is not "history"; it's a cherry-picked and over-simplified string of random factoids to support a pre-defined narrative that is promulgated and heavily funded by the NRA. Like all special interest groups, the NRA can theoretically do some good work to draw attention to important issues. However, when they become the mouthpiece of profit-seeking corporations and deliberately derail the adoption and funding of life-saving technologies like smart guns at the expense of the broader public interest, that's when they become a threat to the health and integrity of a nation.

Guns Don't Kill People; Mentally Ill People Kill People. Gun lobbyists often like to say, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people", but "people kill people" usually only when they don't feel like they have any other economic and political options. Prolonged despair and desperation causes the human mind to deteriorate into various mental pathologies. Guns are important self-defense tools when citizens are properly trained to use them, but a society in debt slavery with corrupt and dysfunctional political institutions will descend into violence and cultural disintegration no matter how many guns we have.

For all the reasons covered throughout Gini's Gun Violence series, the gun control debate is a huge and unnecessary distraction from all the other real-world factors that matter more to democratic and economic freedom in the daily lives of all humans on Earth today. That's why we're building the Gini Platform.